1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to image processing apparatuses, and particularly to an image processing apparatus and an image pickup apparatus for recognizing a predetermined object contained in an image, a processing method for the apparatuses, and a program for causing a computer to execute the processing method.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, image pickup apparatuses, such as a digital still camera, a digital video camera, and a small camera in a cellular phone, have become more sophisticated. As a capability of such image pickup apparatuses, a subject recognition technique for recognizing what the subject is has attracted attention in recent years. As an example of the subject recognition technique, there is proposed a face detection technique in which a human face is detected from a picked-up image through image processing.
As an example of the face detection technique, there is proposed a technique in which a human face is detected by extracting part of a picked-up image, comparing the extracted image with a template, and calculating the probability that the extracted image is a human face image (see, e.g., FIG. 1 of Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2007-4313).
Additionally, there is proposed a technique (so-called face recognition technique) for identifying whether a face detected using a face detection technique is a face of a specific person.
For example, there is proposed an image processing apparatus in which pixels evenly spaced on a face contained in an input image are detected as feature points of the face, local feature information at the feature points is detected by a Gabor filter, the degree of similarity of the detected feature information to facial feature information registered in advance is computed, and thus a person's face is identified (see, e.g., FIG. 2 of Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2006-4003).